Before the conclusion of each Healing Circle, there is a Clearing Round.

The Clearing Round is a monthly column written by John M. Schluep, D.Min. Intended to inform and stimulate thoughtful conversation about returning home from military service.  Your comments, constructive criticism and thoughtful responses are welcomed!

This month Maj Ragain, instructor of the WJHM Writing Class, shares his insight into the healing power brought forth through writing.

Thoughts for the Warriors’ Journey Home Writing Circle

I spent an afternoon reading the poet William Stafford’s  Every War Has Two Losers, a collection edited and published posthumously by his son Kim. Stafford died in 1993. When William, sometime around 1920, was a child, in Kansas, he came home from school one day and told his mother that two new students had been surrounded and bullied because they were black. What did you do, Billy? asked his mother.  I went and stood beside them.

Even as a child, Stafford had somehow formed the idea that one does not necessarily need to fight; nor must one run away. Stafford was later to describe either of these ways as a failure of the imagination.  There is another way: you can stand by the oppressed, the frightened, the other.  Even the one identified (probably not by you) as the enemy. You can stand for the human connection, as witness to that, even when others around you react in anger and retribution. Stafford believed in the fragile yet resilient community of the world, that we are all more alike than we know.  As a poet, he wrote in support of what he termed the unknown good in our enemies. The work is to make that goodness known so we may recognize and honor the nature of our shared life.

When did you last hear such a notion is the media? Many of us see, hear or read the daily news, beginning and ending our days with another person’s truth, or a collective truth, filling our hours with the machine gun fire of instant information. Stafford believed there was another way: to create the news of our common life by writing our own. What is our common life? Can we discover it for ourselves, for each other, by writing stories and poems and sharing them? Can we think independently when the fanatics rant for destruction? Can we speak for reconciliation when the wound is still open?

MSNBC has been on in the background as I write this. I glance up now and again to catch a byline scrolling along the bottom of the screen.

Obama to leave 50,000 troops in Iraq.

US combat brigades in Iraq

to be withdrawn in 18 months. 

Then, a Lipitor commercial splashes across the War Zone.

Lipitor, elixir of the new life, a color splashed commercial of a happy, self-

satisfied middle aged couple wandering hand in hand in a spring pasture.

War is far away.  Plaque, designated enemy of the heart, is in full retreat.

Our work is to cultivate the imagination so it will not fail us when we are called to witness. The poems, the stories, we read here, whatever their subject, are attempts to see and say it for ourselves.  It is as Whitman said: Poetry should cheer slaves and horrify despots. And if you are uncertain as to whether your writing a poem or story matters or contributes to the sum that is the world, turn to Walt Whitman’s Preface to the Leaves of Grass, 1855.

The great poets are also to be 

known by the absence in them

of tricks and by the justification

of perfect personal candor...

How beautiful is candor...

Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.

The soul wants truth. When the soul meets truth, something shifts and awakens in the soul.

 

Stafford tells the story of Welsh citizens, during World War II, huddled in shelters as wave after wave of German bombers unloaded death and destruction.  One night, after months of relentless attacks, a man began to sing in the darkness, alone. Then another. Then many.  The shelters swelled with song. Night after night they sang. It didn’t turn back the Luftwaffe.  But, because they gathered themselves in their humanity and stood against the violence together, Stafford believes that deep within each soul something precious began to form.  He calls it a diamond.  A diamond began to take shape. This is a poet, trying, as he must, to find words for what is beyond the reach of language.  A diamond.  You cannot sell it.  It cannot be lost in the world. It cannot be taken from you. It is the measure of great worth. Believe this. Sing. The writing / a diamond / the soul. 

Maj Ragain